Democrats are in full meltdown over Tennessee’s new congressional map. Are they fomenting Summer of Love 2026? A color revolution just in time for the midterms? (See my earlier essays on the manipulation of electoral maps for partisan political power: The Project to Establish Voting Rights on Rational Grounds Thwarts Progressive Power Grab; Louisiana v. Callais and the Politics of Selective Collectivism.)
Under the old map, the ninth congressional district in Tennessee, which covers Memphis and the surrounding area, has given Steve Cohen, an old white male Democrat, twenty years in Congress. Because of redistricting, a black female Republican may be elected to the seat Cohen has held for far too long.
The public is told that the new map is racist. That it represents the return of the Confederacy. Predictable. But the reality is that competition has come to West Tennessee. This is happening in other areas across the South. For years, Republicans have largely controlled the South, and the party is ensuring that citizens in many of those states are even freer to vote for the political party of their choice.
Nothing prevents voters in the ninth district from voting for Steve Cohen or whoever represents the Democrats in and around Memphis in the future. No black person has lost the right to vote. But, for Democrats, that’s the problem. The party wants to guarantee a Democrat win. It doesn’t matter what color the candidates are. The only thing that matters is partisan political power. This is not about race, but party.
Democrats lost the South with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Southerners like small government. They like Republicans. Once Jim Crow was abolished, Southerners switched parties (they began shifting even before this). So Democrats weaponized electoral maps to retain a toehold in the South. They just lost that strategy. And that’s why they’re losing their mind.
There’s a principle here. We don’t reserve voting districts for Democrats or for ethnic and racial groups in America. Not anymore. At least not for many Southern states. The Voting Rights Act was, in principle, a bad idea. We’re now more than sixty years on from that moment. It’s time to leave tribalism behind.
During Reconstruction, black men were elected to public office at the local, state, and federal levels. There were no majority minority districts drawn to make that happen. Reconstruction was a regime established by the Republicans in the South to protect the rights of newly freed slaves. Redemption drove the Republicans out. Now the Party of Lincoln is back—this time by choice, not by force.
The public is also hearing an old argument again. Democrats are once more harping on the overrepresentation of the South in receiving federal spending, as if they owe the rest of America subservience to identity politics. They don’t want the public to know the reason for that overrepresentation. But here’s the reality: Roughly 55-60 percent of black Americans live in the South, concentrated in states like Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and urban areas throughout the region. Most blacks live in Democratic-controlled cities. In these cities, blacks have been ghettoized and made dependent on welfare.
This dependency allowed the Democrats to cultivate a voting bloc of Americans whose free food, housing, and medicine depended on the Democrats’ hold on power. Democrats have for decades kept a segment of the population that votes for a living rather than works for a living. Those made redundant by Democratic economic policy now have a chance to demand jobs and a higher standard of living. Blacks now have a real chance to pursue autonomy instead of dependency.
The Great Society created the conditions that destroyed the black family and cultivated a culture of disorder. They idled black Americans by pursuing globalization. Reversing the Democrat strategy will, in the long run, help black Americans break free of the chains progressives put on them, regaining their independence and dignity. But redistricting is not just a win for blacks. Redrawing maps in Tennessee and elsewhere creates the potential for all Southerners to liberate the region from administrative rule.
freedom and reason 